February 1999 — Features
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The Educational Enterprise Zone: Where Knowledge Comes From!
The Technology Based Learning Systems department of the New York Institute of Technology, in partnership with Bell Atlantic, the Hitachi Foundation, the New York State Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, the New York State Education Department, the New York City Board of Education, New York State Teacher Centers and numerous content providers, has created a consortium called the Educational Enterprise Zone (EEZ).
Members of this consortium are educational providers, in both formal and informal settings, who will create programming for K-16 classrooms to be delivered via videoconferencing. Many different kinds of institutions, such as research sites, hospitals, museums, cultural institutions, businesses and government agencies will be developing curricular programming for the Educational Enterprise Zone.
The changes in, and development of, new and revised State and National learning standards have triggered the question: "Where will the knowledge come from that will enable our students to meet these goals?" We know that to prepare students for living and working they will need to continually construct and reconstruct knowledge and to wade through vast seas of information. Schools are trying to build technology supported instructional environments in which students, faced with real world problems or circumstances 1) seek needed information, data and resources; 2) organize those ideas into constructs; and 3) apply these constructs to the issues or problems that they are trying to understand. Teachers find themselves in a variety of roles: teacher, facilitator, mediator, guide, leader, team member and advocate. Facts and content take on new meaning as they are integrated and applied to knowledge constructs, which are organized, processed, analyzed and combined to form a new basis for knowledge.
Teachers and Learners Everywhere
If knowledge is knowing, how do our students and teachers come to "know"? In the past, knowledge came from a specific expert in the area of knowledge being "investigated," a person (teacher), a resource (textbook), and, more recently, videotapes, computer disks and CD-ROMS. With the extension of the Internet into the classroom it has become clear that the "expert" exists in many places beyond the classroom, and the "resource" is no longer singular and linear but has many information points and must be viewed in a nonlinear fashion. It is in this context that the New York Institute of Technology developed the Educational Enterprise Zone.
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